


Layers of Contamination

by lucymonster



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Antagonistic Flirting, Earned Trust, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Forgiveness vs Absolution, Happy Ending, forced to work together, garbage picking as a heavy-handed metaphor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-08
Updated: 2019-12-08
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:35:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21622348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lucymonster/pseuds/lucymonster
Summary: Kylo Ren has left the First Order and pledged loyalty to the Resistance. That doesn't mean Rose has to trust him.But when a skirmish gone wrong leaves the Resistance in desperate need of new ship parts, the two of them are sent on a scavenging mission that forces them into unexpectedly close quarters. Rose is on the lookout for signs of worthwhile material buried in trash piles. It's only natural that her eyes eventually fall on her unlikely ally.
Relationships: Ben Solo | Kylo Ren/Rose Tico
Comments: 36
Kudos: 101
Collections: Star Wars Rare Pairs Exchange 2019





	Layers of Contamination

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perlaret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perlaret/gifts).



‘You’ll need to recalibrate the dorsal proximity sensors,’ says an unpleasantly familiar voice. ‘They’re always unreliable after a jumpstart. The AI hates having them touched, so it’ll try to hide the error readouts.’

Rose doesn’t leap out of her skin at the surprise intrusion. She doesn’t look up from her work. Doesn’t turn around. Kylo Ren is the type of man to get a kick out of startling people, and she refuses to give him the satisfaction of catching her off guard.

It takes some self-discipline. Kylo Ren is also the type of man to get a kick out of lopping people’s heads off from behind. Showing him her back feels … counter-intuitive.

He’s picked an easy day to try and get a rise out of her. In the muddled hours between late last night and early this morning, a Resistance detachment came limping back with half its original number of ships and some serious damage to the ones that survived. Most of the pilots had to be shuttled straight to medical for triage. The ground crew woke early to an urgent summons to the hangar for repairs – their new base is well hidden, but each foray is one more chance for someone hostile to get a lock on their location, and they can’t run the risk of the First Order showing up while their fighters are grounded. Rose hasn’t had time to eat yet in the scramble to get the ships back up and flight safe. She’s running on the fumes she inhaled while patching the _Falcon_ ’s leaking coolant tank.

In a voice of forced calm, she asks, ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Some days I wonder,’ says Kylo Ren.

‘Eyes off your navel, nerf-brain. I mean, what are you doing here on the _Falcon,_ bothering me about the dorsal sensors?’

‘Bothering you?’ His honeyed tone sets her teeth on edge. Sarcastic charm doesn’t suit a man who has caused the death of so many millions. ‘My mistake. I thought you might have missed the issue, since you already marked the dorsal work as complete on the repair log. Like I said, the AI lies about those sensors. It would be a shame if the next pilot got shot down by an undetected missile because you fell for a trick as old as the senile droidbrain that keeps this scrap heap flying.’

‘I didn’t fall for anything,’ Rose snaps. This isn’t the first time she’s been forced to wonder at the flimsy pretexts under which Kylo Ren so often feels the need to approach her. ‘And you’re not assigned to the _Falcon_ ’s maintenance, so disembark right now and let me do my job.’

He must be getting something out of it. Men like Kylo Ren don’t do anything without a selfish reason. But Rose hasn’t figured out his angle yet, or the motive for all his posturing and attempted suaveness, except that she’s quite sure every minute she wastes thinking about it is a minute he wins.

‘Run the scans again,’ Kylo Ren calls back at her as he saunters off down the hallway. 

She does. He’s right – the dorsal proximity sensors do need recalibrating. But she’s not about to go running out to tell him that.

* * *

There’s always a faint sulphuric whiff in the command room where Leia holds her briefings. The planet they’ve made their base on is a junkyard, a vast globe of brackish ocean crusted with continents made of compacted industrial waste from nearby Barancar. The hangar where Rose usually works, despite being more frequently open, tends to drown out the garbage stench with burnt-off fuel and the smell of hot engines. But in the compound’s quieter interior rooms, occasional gusts of pungent local atmosphere leak in through the cheaply improvised air filtration system. And then linger. Forever.

With ease born of long practice, Rose suppresses the urge to wrinkle her nose as she delivers her update to assembled command. ‘Unfortunately, given the scale of damage and the lack of resources, we’ve only been able to repair about a third of our ships to full functionality. Another third are flyable but with critical backup systems missing. The rest are grounded until we can come up with replacement parts.’

 _We’re flying on engine tape and faith,_ is what she really wants to say. She can only hope the more formal words she’s chosen are still strong enough to convey their full plight.

Leia’s frown confirms she’s succeeded, but success doesn’t make Rose happy. ‘It’s a dilemma,’ Leia says. ‘To get more parts we need fighters to go out and collect them, but to be able to send out our fighters, we need more parts.’ She pauses, and looks around at the ragtag group of strategists and combat pilots and troublemakers-not-otherwise-specified who these days make up the heart of the Resistance movement. ‘Ideas, anyone?’

Kylo Ren is the first to pipe up. Of course he is. As far as Rose is concerned, he’s got some nerve to keep showing his face at meetings where no one but his mother wants him. He still thinks he’s a gift to the Resistance, even though his defection so far has done nothing more than give the First Order one more reason to hunt them with murderous fury. _He’s atoning for his crimes,_ they say, with gentle looks in Leia’s direction. Rose understands how the gut-deep pull of family attachment can outweigh more abstract ethical concerns. It’s just that, thanks to Kylo Ren and his ex-best friends, all of Rose’s family attachments are dead. ‘Barancar’s factories used to supply a lot of Core World shipyards before the Order’s production lines put them out of business. A lot of their surplus will have ended up in these junkyards.’

Leia doesn’t tell him to shut his mouth and leave the talking to people without whole planets worth of blood on their hands. ‘Are you volunteering for a salvage mission, Ben?’

‘No,’ says Kylo Ren, and Rose is pleased to see he looks annoyed. A few onlookers snicker – not because any of them see shame in making the best of what’s available, but because they know _he_ does, and because the thought of the galaxy’s self-declared overlord turned self-declared liberator digging through piles of rotted garbage is too entertaining to resist. ‘I’m volunteering Rey for a salvage mission. She’s a scavenger. She can find what we need.’ 

Amusement gives way to indignation. Rey isn’t here right now – she’s off on some kind of top-secret mission for Leia that Rose doesn’t know anything about but that’s definitely more important than whatever Kylo Ren is doing – and he’s using her absence to put her in for the dirty jobs he’s too stuck up to do himself. It’s not even that Rose is particularly good friends with Rey. The Resistance’s only (real) Jedi is a cagey, independent sort of person who keeps mostly to herself, and Rose is too intimidated to approach her with anything more than business. Rey would probably laugh at the thought of an engine-room nobody like Rose trying to stand up for her. But Rose can’t help it. 

‘It’s not going to be _difficult_ salvage work,’ she says before anyone else can respond. ‘If the parts are on this planet like you think, then anyone who knows their way around engines will be able to identify the items on my list and bring them back intact. But if you don’t trust yourself to tell the difference between a phase coil and a plasma transvertor, someone else can easily do it. I can do it.’

Engaged as she is staring down Kylo Ren, it takes a moment for Rose to register the look Leia is giving her. Of course, the last time Rose took point on any kind of mission was without Leia’s approval and with catastrophically bad results. Since her ill-fated adventures onboard the First Order flagship _Supremacy,_ she has stuck to the hangar and the engineering bay and left the proper heroes to do the bulk of the initiative-taking. Embarrassed by her outburst, she braces herself to be put firmly back in her place.

‘I’m sure you can do it,’ says Leia, in a voice much warmer than Rose was expecting. ‘Although I disagree that it’s easy. If you’re willing to offer your expertise, Rose, then I’m counting on you to get our fighter squad back in the air. But I won’t send you alone.’ She turns flinty eyes on Kylo Ren. ‘We’ve had reports of all kinds of strange and potentially deadly creatures living out there on the trash dunes. Someone will need to guard Rose while she works. Are you in fighting shape?’

 _You’re not,_ Rose thinks as loudly as she can. This isn’t what she meant to happen. _You’re not, you’re not, you’re not._

‘I think I can handle a few dune worms,’ says Kylo Ren, superbly haughty.

‘Good. That’s settled, then. You’re all dismissed. Rose, Ben, I want you two ready to leave as soon as possible. Take the _Falcon_ and whatever supplies you need. Let’s see what buried treasure this planet has to offer.’

* * *

‘You won’t need that while you’re with me,’ Kylo Ren says when Rose boards the _Falcon_ to find him waiting in the pilot’s seat.

He’s looking at the blaster on her hip. ‘Can’t be too careful,’ she says, settling into her own seat beside him. ‘If tragedy strikes and you accidentally fall into a bottomless trash pit, I need to be able to fend for myself.’

Kylo Ren’s lips twitch. Rose doesn’t like what his face does when he smiles. He has dimples and a good-natured crinkle to his eyes, and it doesn’t seem right that someone soaked in the blood of so many of her loved ones should be capable of looking so incongruously attractive. She also knows that the joke he’s enjoying is at her expense, because he doesn’t take her hatred seriously and because he thinks the idea of her fending for herself is ridiculous. She’s heard more than enough about Kylo Ren’s explosive temper in the face of even the most dubiously imagined insult. His failure to react to her very real one speaks to just how little he takes her seriously.

She doesn’t need his respect anyway. Wouldn’t want it if she had it.

‘Did you recalibrate those dorsal sensors this morning?’ he asks.

‘Run your own scan if you’re worried.’ The answer is yes, but telling him that would mean admitting she took his advice and rechecked. ‘I’ve signed everything off as flight ready, so there’s nothing I can tell you that isn’t on the log.’

‘I’ll take us south. The continent we’re on is one of the older ones, judging by its compaction. The trash heaps near the pole look newer and so they should yield better parts.’

Rose fastens her safety belt and lets him chart the flight how he likes. There’s nothing he’s saying that she hasn’t already surmised from her own review of their surface imaging, but if she planned to argue with every smug, patronising or annoying word out of Kylo Ren’s mouth then she would have needed to bring throat lozenges to stave off hoarseness.

She’s hoping for a small bit of schadenfreude when Kylo Ren inevitably trips up on the _Falcon’_ s mercurial flight controls. To her annoyance, however, he handles the ship with ease and keeps the patchy sublight thrusters running so smoothly that she hardly feels the turbulence as they pass the coastline of Trash Landmass One and set out across the windswept ocean separating them from Trash Landmass Two. At this altitude, the water looks like dark blue glass and the floating masses look like isles instead of trashbergs. Rose keeps her eyes fixed out the viewport and enjoys the familiar engine thrum of a ship in motion on the way to new adventures.

(To new trash adventures, with the Supreme Trash Lord himself. There’s no point getting too misty-eyed about the journey.)

‘What parts are on our list?’ Kylo Ren asks after a while, jolting Rose from the reverie she was able to manufacture despite her surroundings.

‘Why should you care? You’re too good for scavenging, remember?’

He looks, for a moment, perplexed. She likes that even less than she likes his smile. All wide-eyed earnestness and unnecessary intensity. ‘I never said I’m too good for scavenging. I’m here, aren’t I?’

‘Only after you tried and failed to foist it off on Rey.’

‘Rey loves this kind of mission. She’ll be mad when she gets back to base and finds out we went scavenging without her.’

Rose rolls her eyes. If he’s telling the truth, which she has no reason to trust that he is, it still doesn’t change her opinion – sucking up to the Jedi hero who dragged him in like so much cat’s prey and awarded him a second chance over everyone else’s protests is exactly the kind of self-serving, disingenuous thing she’d expect a man like Kylo Ren to do.

‘Fine,’ she says. ‘We need two circuit multiplexers, a handful of extractors and a power outlay differentiator. That one’s hard, because differentiators are fragile and we’re looking at junk that’s been out in the elements for who knows how long. Three of the X-wings are missing shield collators, and the flux stabiliser in the old T-65 needs urgent replacing. We need intergyrons, selectors, a few new hyperchargers if we can possibly get our hands on them–’

‘I doubt we’ll find hyperchargers,’ Kylo Ren interrupts. ‘Those things are expensive – any junker worth their salt would have stripped them for on-selling on the weapons market. But if you need more power to the laser cannons, we can grab some spare converters and rig those up to central power.’

Irritation swells inside Rose. Is there anything this man doesn’t feel qualified to offer his two credits on? ‘They’re not for the cannons. I use modified hyperchargers to help overclock the thrusters for short-term speed boosts. Poe Dameron was flying with one that time he took out your dreadnought.’

The jab leaves no apparent mark on Kylo Ren’s thick hide. ‘If it’s speed you’re after, that’s even easier. Skip the hyperchargers and just bypass the acceleration controls.’

‘How stupid do you think I am? Bypassing those controls weakens the fuel lines in exchange for smaller speed gains than I can achieve with a custom-made booster.’

‘Negligibly smaller.’

‘Not so negligible when you’re getting swarmed by TIE fighters. But if you like, we can trial it on your ship while the rest of the squad get my boosters. If you don’t get shot down in the very first skirmish, we’ll know you’re onto something.’

Kylo Ren gives Rose a look that she likes less than anything she’s seen on his face so far. Thoughtful. Interested. Soft-eyed in a way that makes her want to check the cockpit’s atmospheric settings, because there’s no reason besides oxygen starvation for him to look all misty like that. But he doesn’t say anything, and so her planned follow-up insults evaporate into the stale recycled air.

* * *

Going by the stench it exudes, the southern continent is indeed a fresher trash heap. The upside is that by the time they’re covered head to toe in their hazmat suits and filtration masks, it’s easy for Rose to pretend to have forgotten who she’s working with. Kylo Ren’s face is a constant three-dimensional reminder of the high costs and seething injustices of war: the ruined lives, ruined planets, people who die without recourse and killers who escape punishment by making sad eyes and saying they’re sorry. Swathed in layers of sterile white, he’s just an especially tall anonymous ally who offers her his hand as she steps off the boarding ramp onto the unstable waste heap beneath them.

She ignores the hand, and manages to catch her balance before she regrets it. 

From above, the spot where they’ve landed looked promising, strewn with engine metal and the visible hulls of abandoned starships. Down on the ground it’s completely overwhelming. Rose can’t see past the first towering heap in front of her, and as she surveys the site through her protective duraplast goggles, she realises just how out of her depth she was when she volunteered for this job. Junkyard scavenging makes sense in theory. But it turns out that seeing value in a stinking waste pit like this is a skill, and not an intuitive one, and Rose has no idea where to start.

But start she must. Leia and the Resistance are counting on her. Besides, if he hesitates too long, Kylo Ren is guaranteed to appoint himself leader of the mission and start bossing her around.

‘Over there,’ she says, voice muffled by her mask. She points to a narrow path between two trash mounds. ‘I saw an old shuttle car from above that should have some of what we’re looking for.’

A harsh sun beats down over the junkyard as she climbs into the rusted shuttle and pries the engine hatch open. This planet’s rotation means the sunlit hours run long, and wildly out of time with galactic standard: dawn broke in a blaze of UV at around 0330 this morning, and reprieve won’t come until well past what Rose would usually call bedtime. That’s based on conditions the Resistance have observed from their base near the equator. This close to the pole it could be completely different again.

The inside of the shuttle car is stinking hot, metal walls trapping heat and radiating it into the passenger cabin. Rose blinks sweat out of her eyes and sips lukewarm water from her hydropack to stave off dehydration. Heat notwithstanding, this shuttle is a prize of sorts: it’s a commercial vessel, cheaply made and a decade out of date, but the basic parts aren’t so different and Rose is good at improvising. She frees the useful bits one by one and piles them on a carry net that she has no realistic hope of lifting by herself once she’s done. Kylo Ren will be earning his keep after all.

His shadow flutters through the open viewport as he circles the shuttle car. She hears the faint, unsettling _vshh_ of a lightsaber activating, but after a moment’s frozen tension and the sound of a few unnecessarily elaborate swishes, Rose decides he’s playing with the weapon rather than squaring off against a foe. She rolls her eyes and returns her attention to the half-buried vector magnet in front of her.

She’s still working on jimmying it free when the rumbling starts.

The compacted trash beneath the shuttle begins to shake and shift, filling the air with a deafening metallic rattle. The car tilts. Rose grabs for a handrail to steady herself, and jumps up on a seat to avoid the heavy loose parts that shake free of her carry net and skid across the floor. Heart pounding in her throat, she hauls herself out through the empty viewport and sees Kylo Ren standing with feet planted against the shifting ground.

‘Stay where you are, Rose,’ he calls over the rumble of the earthquake.

In front of him, rearing up out of a mouldering waste pile, is the largest worm Rose has ever seen. Its trunk is so thick that a dozen humans couldn’t hold hands around it. Its skin glints like polished armour in the blistering sun. A mouth big enough to accidentally inhale the _Falcon_ opens wide, revealing rows of teeth like an industrial shredder.

Rose stays where she is. For a brief, wild second, she no longer resents having brought Kylo Ren with her. His broad frame stands between her and the monster like the last angelic sentinel before the blackened gates of hell.

The worm arches up, opening its mouth impossibly wider and emitting a screech that turns Rose’s insides liquid. She scrambles for her blaster, already envisioning its laser bolts bouncing off the monster’s hide like pebbles from a slingshot. But Kylo Ren doesn’t move. With one foot braced for balance on the shuttle hull, he cranes his neck up to look at the worm and shouts as loud as he can:

‘Hey! Do you speak any Basic?’

Rose would stare in naked astonishment if it didn’t mean taking her eyes off their monster. ‘What the – why are you trying to make small talk with the giant fanged worm? Are you that desperate for friends?’

‘My mother says I’m not allowed to kill anyone until I’ve confirmed it’s impossible to resolve our disagreement through non-violent means.’ Even through the muffling of his filtration mask, she can hear Kylo Ren’s voice is thick with contempt. ‘But I don’t think this one’s got much to bring to the mediation table. Will you back me up that its death was unavoidable?’ Without waiting for her answer, he takes a running leap towards the worm, which stretches its cavernous jaw and lunges. In several dizzyingly fast moments, it crashes to the ground in two still-wriggling, earth-shaking pieces, and Kylo Ren retracts his lightsaber with a satisfied zap.

He looks calm, as if dicing up ship-sized invertebrates is a workaday chore. Rose flatly refuses to be impressed. Moments pass, and she becomes aware that the fog she’s seeing through is not a dust cloud but a haze of condensation from her own profuse sweating beneath her goggles. 

‘Are you okay?’ Kylo Ren says, as she tries and fails to pry her death grip off the edge of the shuttle car.

The question prompts a surge of anger that finally allows her to loosen her rictus. It’s none of his business if she’s okay or not. ‘Fine,’ she snaps, hoping the mask will hide the quaver in her voice. ‘And yes, this time I’ll back you up. But in future, you might want to try thinking up a moral code that doesn’t revolve around what mommy says you’re allowed to do.’ Breathing hard, she ducks back inside the safe shell of the shuttle car.

Kylo Ren follows her. He seems more agitated now than he was about the giant worm. ‘That’s not fair,’ she hears behind her as she returns to the vector magnet – wounded and indignant, for all the world as though he, Kylo Ren, has been a lifelong champion of fairness only to see his work ground to nothing beneath her boot. ‘She’s my commanding officer, same as you. Who else’s code should I be following?’

‘I don’t care,’ says Rose. She would love a moment to catch her breath from the attack before having to deal with more of Kylo Ren’s belligerence. ‘Follow whatever code you want. I’m just saying, you’re not much use as a bodyguard if you have to seek parental permission before stomping an overgrown bug or two. It’s common sense. That thing wanted to eat us.’

‘It was trash talk,’ says Kylo Ren with a heavy sigh. ‘You know, a joke. Maybe you’ve never heard of those on–’

‘Hays Minor,’ Rose finishes for him. The last of her fear rushes out with the words, turning them sharp-edged and brittle. Left over is nothing but anger. ‘You should have heard that name before, given it was a favourite First Order proving ground. There wasn’t much left for us locals to joke about after the first few rounds of shelling.’

The magnet comes free, and Rose drops it with a clang into her now-empty carry net. She’ll need to gather up the rest of her scattered haul before leaving.

‘I was never on Hays Minor,’ says Kylo Ren at last. ‘That was before my time. I understand you’re angry, and you have good reason to be. But you can’t blame me for every–’

‘So the senseless destruction of my homeworld had already happened,’ Rose says loudly over the top of him. ‘And you looked at that and thought, “yes, fine,” and decided to sign up anyway.’ She pauses, draws breath, leaves him an opportunity to speak. For once in his life he has the sense not to take it. ‘Just because we fight on the same side now doesn’t make us friends. So don’t you dare tell me who I can or can’t blame, and don’t you ever, _ever_ joke with me.’

He doesn’t respond. Silence falls, and the shadow through the viewport tells her he’s resumed his giant worm lookout post. Sticky with evaporating fear sweat, baking like a Life Day roast inside the shuttle car, Rose resumes scavenging. 

It takes a while till she can get her hands steady.

* * *

After the shuttle, there’s a corvette to strip and a pile of loose spare parts to unearth. The sun starts to retreat, turning the sky dishwater grey. Rose can’t tell if it’s the shortened polar cycle catching her out or if she’s lost track of time while working on her salvage. Her hazmat suit is clinging to her sweaty clothes, mask digging uncomfortably into her face. The shakes are coming back again. Blood sugar, this time, not dune worms – Kylo Ren has dispatched a few across the day, each time with such easy efficiency that Rose no longer freezes in fear when the telltale rumbling starts. The only rumbles now are coming from her stomach.

As if by some magical intuition, Kylo Ren sticks his head over the rim of the junk pit. ‘We should take a break,’ he calls down to her. ‘Empty the carry net. Eat something.’

‘We’re wasting daylight. Can you really not manage without a snack?’ Ignoring her own hunger, Rose decides on the spot that his is contemptible – a sign of weakness, of base self-interest at the expense of the cause he’s supposed to be serving. She’s heard unnerving stories about the Force and the ability of its wielders to read minds so they can tell (for instance) when the people around them are lying through their teeth about being hungry. But Rose is a Haysian girl, tough and hardy and used to long work hours. If he reads her mind – creep – she’s determined he’ll find nothing but resolve.

‘We have floodlights if we need them,’ says Kylo Ren. ‘But no one’s expecting us back at base tonight. The flight here was five hours with a tailwind. It’ll be six, maybe seven going back the other way. And I’m under orders not to waste fuel or compromise our cover by breaking atmo. If we have to make the whole trip at sublight, at some point we’ll need to stop and sleep.’

‘I know that already,’ says Rose, who in truth hasn’t spared a thought for the return journey’s timing. All her attention and energy has gone on making sure they get the parts they need. She’s been awake since well before dawn. The world around her looks hazy and blurred and it’s not just because of the twilight.

‘Come on. All the parts in the world are no use if the mechanic’s too exhausted to install them. Besides, I just got off the comm to my mother. Everyone’s okay. If no one’s showed up to attack them yet then we can safely assume our cover is still safe. We have time.’

Annoyed beyond the power of words at his gentle tone of voice – annoyed that he’s right, which he has no business being – Rose clambers out of the junk pit.

At least half of what’s in the carry net is likely to be a waste of Kylo Ren’s lifting strength. Too corroded, too incompatible, too out of date to be of any real use. She ignores his grunt of effort as he shoulders the burden. Some of it will be useful, and in her eyes that more than makes up for his fleeting discomfort.

Getting in and out of the hazmat gear is a hassle, but it’s better than trailing garbage stench into the _Falcon._ They strip off their protective suits in the loading bay, and Rose is once again forced to look at the unmasked face of Kylo Ren. The face that insists on drawing her eye in mixed anger and resentful curiosity – not handsome, exactly, but charismatic and easy to keep looking at. It makes her angry. If there were any justice in the galaxy, he’d have been born with looks to match his cancerous soul. If there were any justice, that scar across his eye would have disfigured him instead of adding rugged visual interest.

‘Is there something on my face?’ he asks, brow furrowing.

‘Only the unbleachable stains of a filthy conscience.’

Kylo Ren sighs and peels off the shirt he was wearing beneath his hazmat suit. His undershirt lifts up with it, exposing a flash of pale, toned stomach before he frees his arms and tugs it back down. Rose quickly identifies her emotional reaction as disgust and nothing else.

Dinner is a quiet affair, as the two of them bypass social niceties and focus on inhaling their rations at record speed after the day’s hard labour. With her belly full and her body stripped down to just her comfortable indoor clothes, Rose comes to terms with what Kylo Ren told her earlier: they’re not getting the job done tonight. The thought of gearing up again makes her hurt all over. She claims the refresher for first shower instead, and settles the matter by changing down into her even more comfortable sleepwear.

Locked inside the steaming refresher, she briefly weighs up her comfort against the surreal indignity of letting Kylo Ren see her in pyjamas. She could shrug a jacket over the top. But her arms ache from lifting scrap all day, so in the end she stalks right past him in her flannels. There’s a predictably awkward moment when he sees her, and then a confusingly protracted one during which he doesn’t avert his gaze and the _Falcon_ ’s dodgy lumens make his eyes look dark and soft. He’s probably trying to embarrass her by staring. She holds her head high and walks the rest of the way down the hall with her head held high.

There’s only one bunk room that isn’t currently being used for storage, and Rose takes it without much thought for her companion beyond a vague assumption that he’ll stay out on the lounge. Indignation briefly rouses her from sleepiness when he follows her in a short while later, pink-skinned from his own shower and dressed in nothing but a thin linen robe. He takes the opposite bunk and opens his mouth like he’s about to say something, but nothing comes, and Rose decides to save her energy for a fight more important than chasing him away from the only unoccupied mattress on board.

He probably doesn’t fit on the lounge, with those stupidly long legs and over-broad shoulders. Rose faces the wall. The bunk room is filled with the soft whooshing sound of a much larger set of lungs than hers breathing in and out.

‘Do you think the dune worms will attack the _Falcon_?’ The words leave her mouth without any forewarning – it’s not that she’s scared. She hasn’t even been thinking about the worms. And there’s no part of her that’s relieved to have him close.

‘Pro’lly not.’ He sounds groggy. Half asleep already. ‘I’ll try to wake if they do.’

With that, he sinks down into the mattress and shows every sign of being fast asleep.

It’s not much reassurance, which is why it’s lucky that Rose didn’t need any in the first place. But she doesn’t have too much trouble nodding off after him. If the dune worms do come, he’ll make a much more satisfying morsel than her.

* * *

She wakes with the greatest reluctance next day, and finds that last night’s overworked muscle ache has turned into deep, stiff pain that makes her feel about ten years older. The chrono on the wall reads 0632. Not only has she overslept and left the Resistance waiting for her back at base, but she’s also missed the cool morning hours before the sun had its chance to heat the garbage piles back up to sweltering.

When she fell asleep, Kylo Ren was curled into a relatively unobtrusive ball across the room from her; now, unconscious, he has sprawled. He’s flat on his back, hair fanned across the pillow and feet sticking out the end of the bunk. One arm dangles loose off the side, knuckles grazing the floor beside the crumpled pile of the coarse woollen duvet that’s slipped off him in the night. Through the thin grey topsheet that remains, Rose can see the perfect outline of his body – including, to her mortification, the unmissable bulge of a large and prominent morning erection.

It’s gross and too much information and she stares for about a minute as her suddenly wide-awake brain records every detail of the view. Then she stares for another thirty seconds or so while she reminds herself that she doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know and also feels nothing but disgust and disdain.

People like Kylo Ren don’t deserve to have large erections. They don’t deserve to have _any_ erections. Slipping quietly from her bunk, she leaves him alone with it, because she’s not about to go over and shake him awake when he’s in that condition. 

He wakes not much later without her help, and in no time at all they’re back out on the dunes with hazmat gear safely covering every inch of what Rose must now make it her life’s work to unsee. While she’s climbing her way carefully down into the least exploited of yesterday’s trash piles, he calls back to base on his handheld and confirms once more that everyone is alive and carrying on without them. Rose has her eye on a small oscillator that could come in very handy if she finds a way to dig it free of its highly compacted home. Kylo Ren has his eye on a rippling bit of ground in the distance that will probably turn out to be a ravenous dune worm when it gets a little closer. 

Less grumpy for a good night’s sleep, Rose can now grudgingly admit that she’s glad he’s with her if only for the sake of the worms. Hand to hand combat has never really been her strong suit, and the area around their scavenging site is strewn with more worm carcasses than she would have thought possible given the sparse spread of biomatter elsewhere on this planet. They must have lucked across some kind of nest or breeding ground. Kylo Ren’s proficiency at killing things has turned out to be invaluable.

This has always been the issue with Kylo Ren, since the day he showed up alone on the Resistance radar waving his white flag and promising a change of heart. He’s morally repugnant but pragmatically useful, and the Resistance are not in a position to turn away useful things. That’s why Rose is out here rummaging through industrial refuse, and if Kylo Ren were just one more piece of trash she was forced to hose off and repurpose, then maybe she could make her peace with that. 

She doesn’t like being close enough to see the more or less regular human man beneath the layers of contamination. She doesn’t want to know that he mumbles in his sleep or that he opens his formal reports back to base with a brisk ‘hi, mom’.

(She doesn’t want to know about his large – no, she’s still not thinking about that.)

Maybe there’s a part of Rose that would love to be able to effortless dehumanise her enemies. She’d love to ignore the messy interpersonal parts and focus on pure, unsullied ideology. But she can’t. She’s never had the knack, and even if she could, the cognitive dissonance would be too much: _people_ are the load-bearing pillars of her ethical framework, and taking them out would bring the whole structure down. Kylo Ren, towering pillar of a creature that he is, has to fit into it somehow.

She sets to work clipping the connector wires holding the oscillator in place, and thinks uncomfortable thoughts about yesterday and how Kylo Ren tried to banter her out of her fear of the worms and how he talked her into stopping for the night when she was dead set on working herself to the point of collapse. What unnerves her about it all is that he’s clearly not – or at least, not _just_ – the callous, inward-facing narcissist she expected. His ability to connect and empathise is still intact. She can’t understand how a person could have that ability and yet choose to commit the crimes Kylo Ren has committed. An unfeeling monster would make more sense.

Another unfeeling monster rears up out of the dunes and rattles the oscillator out of Rose’s grasp. Kylo Ren’s lightsaber crackles to life, and a fresh carcass falls to the ground to join its decomposing brethren. Rose tightens the strap of her filtration mask a little.

This isn’t the time or place for philosophy. She needs to get the job done so they can leave this trashpit and head home.

* * *

They’re clambering back over a high mound towards the _Falcon_ when Rose catches sight of something several dunes over: two bristling laser turrets thrusting towards the sky, attached to what looks very much like the jagged snout of an old BTL-line light bomber.

‘Look,’ she says, and throws out an arm to stop Kylo Ren in his tracks. It doesn’t take much strength. Weighed down by the bulging carry net full of Rose’s most recent salvage load, his stride falters almost of its own accord and she can hear him panting through the filtration mask.

Her own fatigue is forgotten. If that is a bomber she’s seeing, and if its owners dumped it here without stripping its defensive canons, then it might still have a hypercharger – one of valuable components Kylo Ren was so sure they wouldn’t find out here, that Rose can use to build another speed booster for a Resistance starfighter.

‘ _Falcon_ first,’ says Kylo Ren raggedly. ‘I can’t carry this all that way.’

‘Can’t you just use the Force?’

‘How do you think the Force works?’ After all this time wishing he’d act more like a proper enemy, Rose is less than delighted with the peevishness in his voice. It is, she realises with some confusion, the first time on the whole trip that he’s spoken to her with any actual ill temper. His voice sounds different without the layer of silky charm he always seems to use around her. ‘I’ve been drawing on it all day. At this point, my arms are less exhausted than my powers.’

‘Fine. Just hurry up.’ It’s not like the bomber is going anywhere, but Rose is excited, her imagination revving as she thinks back to the last booster she built and all the improvements she’s since come up with. 

But progress is slow. Kylo Ren’s steps are deliberate and laborious, and he keeps stopping to readjust his grip or shift the net’s weight to his other side. Rose’s impatience builds. At the pace they’re moving, she could make it across the dunes to the bomber and still lap him on the way back to the _Falcon._ She’s not planning to set up shop and start working on the engine without her bodyguard – she just wants to know whether there really is a hypercharger to be found or whether she’s getting excited over nothing. She’s had enough worm encounters now to know the signs of one approaching and get herself out of harm’s way in time. They’re fearsome, but not fast, and the thickness of their bodies slows them down as they plough their way through the trash-compacted ground. She can outrun one if it comes to that.

It’s not that she miscalculates. It’s just that one of the variables changes after she’s made her calculation, and she doesn’t have enough forewarning to adjust for it. That’s all. A small mistake in the grand scheme of things.

It almost costs her everything.

She calls out to Kylo Ren that they’re splitting up, but the mask muffles her voice and he’s panting quite hard and so it’s possible he doesn’t hear her. She makes quick, easy progress across the dunes, but a solid-looking piece of scrap turns out not so solid when she puts her weight on it, and the thing slips out beneath her. She rolls her ankle on the fall. Hurting but well trained, Rose keeps calm and assesses the injury and decides that, though capable of bearing weight, it needs strapping if she’s going to trust her footing on this uneven ground. 

She drops her pack and rummages for the basic field kit that has bandages and bracing tape. Naturally, that’s the moment a worm decides to erupt from the dune in front of her.

With a shout, Rose grabs for her blaster and fires off three rapid shots. They don’t bounce off the worm’s hide like she’d feared, but they also don’t noticeably slow it down. It rears up in displeasure at the wounds. Gives one of its deafening shrieks. Its mouth opens wide, razor-teeth looming closer as it lunges towards Rose. She tries to run and promptly slips again as hot, sick pain shoots up her leg from her injured ankle. Panicking, she claws at the ground, trying to flee on her hands and knees. She can’t crawl fast enough. The worm is right behind her. It screeches and opens its mouth impossibly wider –

And suddenly Rose is flying, sailing backwards through the air, lifted up by an invisible force as the worm’s teeth snap closed behind her. She lands hard, skidding on her hip, and sees Kylo Ren sprinting up the dune to get between her and the worm. With one hand outstretched calling on the Force and the other grasping his lightsaber, he makes it just as the worm is rallying for a second attempt. 

But he’s off balance, visibly exhausted, chest heaving from his burst of speed. His swing is desperate, with none of its usual deadly precision, and the sizzling gash it leaves only enrages the worm rather than decapitating it. The thing attacks him. In one horrifying instant, Rose sees the fat, rippling worm body twist in midair and its cavernous mouth descend as Kylo Ren curls in on himself in a nightmarish echo of the way she saw him fall asleep last night. She sees him disappear behind those jagged rows of teeth. Helpless terror blots out her conscious mind. She only barely sees what happens next: the worm’s sudden thrashing, and the sizzling, ripping sound as a lightsaber cuts it open from the inside out.

It falls heavily. Kylo Ren rolls out. He’s filthy and sticky and his hazmat suit is torn from his shoulder halfway down his left arm where the worm’s teeth caught. He tries to stagger to his feet, and fails; Rose tries to stagger to hers, and only succeeds in causing her ankle another agonising twinge. She crawls over instead. He’s too busy lying face down in his pool of blood-tinged worm saliva to notice the indignity.

‘I’m sorry,’ he rasps when she rolls him on his back. ‘I didn’t even notice you weren’t behind me. By the time I felt the ground rumble–’

‘Are you okay?’ It’s a stupid question. What little parts of his face she can see through the protective gear are ashen-grey and soaked in sweat. But he tries to sit up again, and this time he succeeds.

‘I’m fine. Just tired. Thing bit me – not too deep. I’ll be fine.’

He won’t be fine. Rose has no medical training beyond the basic field crash-course all Resistance fighters take upon enlisting. She’s naive enough to hope for the best when he manages to regain his feet and help her up along with him; arm in arm, leaning on each other in turns, they make it back across the dunes to the safety of the _Falcon._ But as soon as the hatch hisses shut, Kylo Ren runs out of whatever reserve energy he was drawing on to get them this far. He sinks to the floor of the hold and doesn’t get back up. When Rose removes his goggles and mask, she finds his face cold despite the searing heat outside. When she strips off the shredded hazmat suit to better examine his wound, she sees torn flesh marred with a sticky black fluid that smells of something far more toxic than just trash.

‘You might have to fly us home,’ says Kylo Ren. ‘I just need to, uh.’

Nothing more but ragged breathing.

He’s been poisoned, that much Rose can tell. Beyond that she has no idea how to even start assessing his condition. She doesn’t know how fast it might progress or what danger signs to watch for, or what to do if he starts seizing or blacking out or whatever people do when they’re dying of a mystery worm bite. She thinks about the six or seven hour flight that it’ll take her to get him back to base – maybe longer still, with no copilot to keep things running smoothly. She thinks about his orders from Leia: sublight travel only. Don’t waste fuel or risk cover by breaking atmo. Surely, _obviously_ they weren’t meant to apply to a scenario like this.

Wrangling the _Falcon_ into hyperspace with no copilot will be even harder than handling it at sublight. The tiny jump from here to the planet’s other side will be difficult to pinpoint. The walk down the hall to the cockpit will be agony on her throbbing ankle.

Rose doesn’t spare any of it another moment’s thought. Running on adrenaline, she moves.

* * *

‘It’s not all bad,’ says Leia, smiling grimly. ‘Until now, we didn’t realise the local fauna were poisonous. This is useful data to have.’

Rose did the right thing, the general hastened to tell her when she first stepped off the _Falcon_ after an emergency landing from fresh out of hyperspace. Kylo Ren didn’t stir when the med droids lifted him off the hold floor, blue-skinned and limp with a slurry of froth around his mouth. They took him straight to medical. Rose followed soon after, unsteady on her injured ankle but too ashamed to ask for anyone’s help. She earned her injury being an idiot. Kylo Ren earned his in a desperate bid to save her from the consequences.

Now the medics are waiting to see if their hastily formulated antivenom works, and Rose is sitting with her leg elevated while a bacta wrap works its magic on her partially torn ligaments. ‘He’ll be okay,’ says Leia, sitting beside her in the waiting room outside the intensive care chamber. ‘The medics are brilliant at what they do, and my son has the hardiest constitution of anyone I’ve ever met. He’s not going to let a little worm bite do him in.’

She sounds confident – a perfect echo, Rose now notices, of the bold, authoritative style of speech that annoys her so much when it comes from Leia’s son. From Leia herself it feels reassuring, and Rose leans into it like a crutch to help her bear her weight while her leg’s out of action. ‘It was my fault he got hurt. He was tired, and instead of being patient, I charged off without him and walked straight into trouble. If he hadn’t thrown himself after me, I’d be giving that worm a case of indigestion as we speak.’

Leia’s smile is thin and anxious, untouched by the confidence in her voice. ‘When he wakes up, he might want to thank you for the opportunity. Ben’s only ever happy when he’s risking his neck in some heroic battle or other. He’s had surprisingly few opportunities since he joined the Resistance. I think he was envisioning a lot more redemption through reckless self-sacrifice.’

A couple of days ago, Rose would have laughed at this: of course a man like Kylo Ren would fancy himself the swashbuckling, saber-swinging hero of the story, adding notches to his murder belt for the greater good and admiration of all. Having now spent some time in his company – having been, herself, the beneficiary of his heroic impulses – Leia’s comment lands a little differently. 

‘General,’ she says cautiously. ‘Can I ask you a personal question?’

‘You can ask anything you like. I’ll decide for myself whether to answer.’

‘When Kylo Ren surrendered. When he came back to you. There were so many reasons not to trust him. I mean, he–’ _Killed your husband._ No. Too far. ‘He’d been so devoted to his evil cause, but you believed it when he turned on his heel, and you trusted him enough to put him in charge of my life. Not that my life in particular is important, or anything. I know I’m just one soldier in your army. But I mean–’ Rose swallows. Breathes. Forces herself to look into Leia’s kind, patient eyes. ‘How did you know for sure?’

‘For sure? I didn’t know anything for sure. I had a strong feeling. The Force – but I know that’s not a satisfying answer for you, is it?’ Leaning forward in her chair, Leia takes Rose’s hand. Her palm is warm and paper-dry, and Rose’s is so clammy. ‘What you have to understand about my son is that he runs on feeling. He likes to pretend he’s detached and analytical – I suppose you’ve seen that side of him in meetings.’ Rose certainly has. ‘But it’s a front, and a ridiculous one. Ben emotes his way through life and then adapts his beliefs to reflect what he’s feeling. The evil cause was always less important than the devotion, if that makes sense.’

It kind of does. Rose thinks it does. It also makes no sense at all, because she can hardly imagine what would happen if she took the same approach and refused to run her most intense feelings through a fine-meshed sieve of ethical rationality. All her pent-up rage at what the First Order did to her homeland. Her grief for her family. Her despair at the totalitarian darkness engulfing the galaxy. If she let those feelings guide her actions, she’d probably –

Oh.

Well.

It serves her right for asking a question that wasn’t her business. And it doesn’t absolve anyone of anything, not in a million years. But suddenly, despite her very firmest plans to stay suspicious and resentful, she thinks she might understand why Kylo Ren turned out the way he did.

‘I knew I could trust him,’ says Leia, ‘when I felt the depth of his remorse. He’s always been hopeless at controlling his emotions, and this one is too strong for him ever to overcome. At the risk of sounding hard-hearted, I think that’s appropriate. Remorse will rule him for the rest of his life, and as long as he’s in its grasp, he’ll do whatever it takes to atone. And for the record–’ She smiles. ‘There’s no such thing as “just one soldier”. Every life matters. I’d be a hypocrite drilling that so deep into my son’s thick skull if I didn’t believe it whole-heartedly myself.’

Rose realises she’s been holding her breath. She lets it out and feels her lungs shiver in relief. ‘He says he’s not allowed to kill anything if he can help it. He actually tried to negotiate with the first worm we saw.’

‘Always such a literalist,’ says Leia. She sounds both exasperated and fond.

The door to intensive care slides open. A medic droid steps out and says, ‘The patient has regained consciousness,’ and as Rose’s hand slips from Leia’s she understands it’s time for her to give the family some privacy.

* * *

She makes up her mind that she’s not going to visit Kylo Ren in his sickbed. Her complicated feelings and her far-too-intimate discussion with Leia don’t have to mean anything; there’s plenty of work to do out in the hangar, and there’s no reason for Rose not to carry on as usual until Kylo Ren gets a clean bill of health. At that point, when they inevitably bump into each other, she can thank him politely for saving her and then get straight back to her normal life.

Her mind, once made up, has always been quite firm, so it surprises Rose as much as anyone when her feet take her back to the med ward anyway.

It’s been a little more than one galactic standard day since they returned to base. Kylo Ren is sitting up in bed, his face perhaps a little pale but much less blue than it was last time. As always, Rose is struck with an uncomfortable wriggle in her stomach at the sight of him, with his floppy hair and sharply angled cheekbones and the deep, dark pits of his hooded eyes. With less determined hatred obstructing her view, she’s obliged to admit to herself that the feeling is not quite the disgust she always told herself it was.

The draping sheets remind her of the last time she saw him in bed. More modest now, but no less of an enormous slab, he nods to the empty visitor’s chair and watches her take it with the quiet intensity she has come to understand as his resting state.

‘How’s your ankle?’ he asks after a moment’s silence during which Rose completely and inexplicably fails to offer any word of greeting.

‘My ankle? Oh, it’s fine. How’s your, uh … everything?’

‘Fine. I’m fine. Completely better. But the medics are being over-cautious since it’s the first case of this kind of poisoning they’ve seen. They insist I need a few more days of monitoring.’

‘And the bandages all over your arm and shoulder?’

‘Precautionary.’ Kylo Ren grimaces, showing the dimples on his cheeks. ‘I guess the wound’s still oozing a little. Something in that venom slowed the healing down. But it’s fine.’

‘Yeah, “oozing” is definitely the first word that comes to my mind when I think of “fine”.’

Kylo Ren gives her a flat look and says, ‘I thought you and I weren’t allowed to joke.’

The monitor by his bedside beeps. Rose feels small. It’s not hard: Kylo Ren is huge even half-reclined, and her feet barely brush the floor when sitting in this chair. ‘I owe you an apology,’ she forces herself to say. ‘It’s my fault you got hurt, and I owe you my life for stepping in the way you did. It was so much more than you had to do.’

‘No it wasn’t,’ says Kylo Ren, with a sudden and surprising amount of fervour. ‘My job was to get you back alive. I got hurt because I lost concentration and nearly screwed the whole thing up. If you’d died…’

‘It wouldn’t have been your fault.’

‘The Resistance would have lost one of its best people.’

Rose stares at him. This kind of conversation is so naturally out of her comfort zone – and so wildly outside what she would always have assumed would be _his_ – that she’s not sure whether it’s her usual sense of inadequacy making her squirm or if he’s really just gone and crossed a boundary. ‘I can see why the medics are keeping you back,’ she says at last, aiming for jocular despite his earlier protest. ‘You’ve clearly suffered some kind of lasting head trauma. I’m just a mechanic–’

‘If you were _just_ a mechanic,’ Kylo Ren interrupts, ‘then they wouldn’t have assigned a fighter of my calibre to protect you.’ That sounds more like the arrogant man she’s so used to disliking. Rose’s stab of irritation helps settle her nerves back down, which is something, at least. ‘My mother knows your worth, and so do I. You’re loyal. Brave. Full of conviction. You’ve never wavered, not even for a moment – not even when you had every reason in the world to want to turn your back on your beliefs.’ His voice thickens, and for the first time since she entered the room, he stops meeting her eye. ‘You’re worth more to the cause than I am. That’s the reality. I’d rather have paid any cost than let you come to harm.’

More beeping. The vital monitor is picking up speed as his pulse accelerates, filling the sterile room with an electronic echo of his tendency towards mood swings. ‘You’re wrong,’ Rose says, far more comfortable saying that than she is saying anything gentler. ‘Your mother told me that she values every life in the Resistance equally. She also told me that you’re obsessed with feeling remorseful and that you like being in danger because it makes you feel like you’re atoning.’

‘My mother,’ says Kylo Ren, face darkening, ‘should use some of that politician’s guile and keep her mouth shut.’

‘She’s right though, isn’t she?’ 

‘No, she’s not. I fight for the Resistance because I’m trying to atone. I fought for _you_ because I wanted to. You know every ship in our fleet like the back of your hand, and you’re the only person in the whole engineering bay who doesn’t cringe in fear when I come near them.’

‘I cringe in disgust sometimes.’

‘I know you do.’

‘And that doesn’t put you off at all?’

Kylo Ren shrugs, trying valiantly to hide the wince as the movement pulls his not-quite-healed shoulder. ‘What can I say? I’ve always had a weakness for women who treat me a little rough.’

 _He’s winding you up,_ says the voice of everything Rose has ever believed about Kylo Ren. _Pushing boundaries. Trying to get a rise out of you so he can laugh._ But his expression is earnest. Far more earnest than the feeble, sleazy line deserves.

Rose rolls her eyes. She lets him see her do it, makes it look as unkind as possible – taking him at his word about rough treatment, and also buying herself a bit of time to see if the scattered thoughts swirling inside her head might coalesce into words. It’s a long shot and it doesn’t land. Rose has never been a gifted talker.

What she does instead makes her dearly hope that none of the nearby medical droids store visual records in their memory banks. It’s awkward. Impulsive. It takes a bit of adjusting and clambering to get the right angle without hurting his shoulder. But as always, Rose works with what she’s got, and when she kisses him – a quick, heart-pounding brush of lips, more a test than anything, a dare to herself, and experiment – for once in his life, he doesn’t chime in with any unsolicited critiques or suggestions for better technique.

He just turns very pink.

Then, with far less hesitation, he kisses her back, and Rose is satisfied at last that he isn’t playing any kind of strange evil game or making fun of her for his own obscure ends. That, as it now turns out, he likely never was.

The monitor beside his bed beeps its protest at his elevated heart rate, but it doesn’t seem to bother Kylo Ren and so Rose ignores it too.

* * *

There’s a part of Rose that still churns with confusion every time she looks at Kylo Ren. All her misgivings, her horror at the things he’s done, her anger at the fallout and her niggling guilt for letting her emotions make an exception to her principles – they’re all still there. 

But there’s another part that doesn’t care. Because it turns out that the thing she’s been trying to brand as revulsion and disdain for so long is in fact a searing chemistry that makes principle feel like a distant concept. Rose will have plenty of time to work the tangles out. For now, she’s just enjoying the rush of hormones and the weird sense of rightness when he joins her in the hangar and eyes her up and down – grease-stained jumpsuit and all – with all the warmth and admiration that his expressive dark eyes are capable of.

‘I was thinking,’ he says, leaning against the wall of the _Falcon_ ’s dorsal chamber where Rose is recalibrating the sensors again. His tip about the lying AI was right: they’re wildly out of tune again after the clumsy single-pilot lightspeed jump she made last time she flew it. He still looks a little peaky, his healed shoulder slightly stiff to move and his face even paler than his sun-avoidant lifestyle can justify. But he’s back to trying to sound suave and cocky. She wants to tell him that it doesn’t really work for him, but – well, the evidence doesn’t exactly back her up. ‘Once I’m back in fighting shape, we should go and collect that hypercharger. I’d like to see one of your speed boosters up close.’

‘I’ve been revisiting your idea about bypassing the accelerator,’ Rose counters. ‘I’m still worried about the fuel lines, but I think if I can find a way to reinforce those, it might work without requiring such expensive parts.’

‘Maybe we can try both and compare. Depending on the results we get, we could roll out the boosters across the whole fighter fleet.’

He’s still unsteady on his feet – unsteady enough that he’s easy to push off his balance, but not so unsteady that Rose feels bad about doing it.

She shoves him back against the wall, kissing him hard and winding her fingers through his silky hair to pull him down to her level. He cups her behind and lifts her with disconcerting ease, and turns them around so that she’s braced against the wall with her legs around his waist. There’s something like awe in the way he looks at her. Awe, and a deep, trembling want that matches the constant fever-pitch of his emotions in general. Maybe even slightly exceeds it. Rose’s mind is not exactly in an analytical place. 

‘Clothes,’ she says.

‘Uh-huh.’ He loosens her belt and unzips the front of her jumpsuit, but once he realises he can reach past the zipper and get his hand inside her panties, the rest of his undressing attempt is forgotten and Rose loses all desire to remind him of it.

He fucks her against the wall, face buried in the crook of her neck, breathing hard and digging his fingers into the fleshy underside of her thighs. He’s exactly as large as he looked that day in the bunk beside her, and Rose is so full that she has nothing left except the stretch and the heat and the way he throbs inside her as his pace quickens.

‘Slow down,’ she gasps, and is pleased by how quickly he obeys, the overpowering bulk of him going still beneath her touch as he slows his thrusts down to a tantalising ache. His breathing, on the other hand, is faster than ever.

She wants to draw this out. Make it last. Make him beg. She has a feeling it won’t be too much of a challenge.

She’s right. And when they’re done – when she’s spent from pleasure and he’s slumping down the wall in slack relief – she makes sure to tease him about it. He doesn’t seem to mind. His kiss-bitten mouth curls into another one of those dimpled smiles that she’s forced to admit she no longer hates even a little bit.


End file.
